Swedish criminologist Ardavan Khoshnood has warned that an unknown number of jihadists may have entered Sweden thanks to the ineffective border control recently revealed in a leaked EU report.
Khoshnood, a criminologist at Malmö University, said that the recent leaked European Union report on Sweden’s border deficiencies could have led to jihadists sneaking into the country saying: “The most serious thing is that so-called jihadists can enter the country without anyone knowing about it.”
“Many who work outside as border controllers may have worked with something else before. They are given a week’s education, they will check passports and then they do not even have access to what they should pay attention to,” he added, reports Svenska Dagbladet.
The criminologist also reacted to Swedish border police head Patrik Engström who said fixing the problems outlined in the EU report could take the country up to five years, saying: “There has long been a naivety for us. If Engström says five years then it’s five years. It will take a long time before we can build a border check that is worth its name.”
“One should not forget that the police are an authority under the government and are controlled from there. But this report opens up the eyes of our politicians to actually do something,” he added.
The leaked report, which was partially published last month in Swedish media, claimed that the border agency guards were barely trained and said that Sweden’s border control was among the worst in Europe.
The news comes as Sweden has been connected to more and more active investigations into radical Islamic terrorist activity according to prosecutor Solveig Wollstad, Sweden’s National Representative of EU legal body Eurojust.
Others, like Swedish Defence College researcher Peder Hyllengren, have claimed that the country has become a hub for international radical Islamic networks.
Hyllengren said part of the reason for the growth of radical Islam in Sweden was down to pressure to be politically correct, saying: “You risk being identified as racist in a way that you did not see in other European countries.”
“There, this question was as uncontroversial as the importance of combating Nazism and right-wing extremism. But in Sweden, it took a long time before we could discuss jihadism in the same way that we discussed Nazism for a long time.”
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